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Physicists (String Theorists) and Philosophers Debate the Scientific Method
StartsWithABang writes: One of the most damning, albeit accurate, condemnations of String Theory that has been leveled at it is that it's untestable, non-empirical, and offers no concrete predictions or methods of falsification. Yet some have attempted to address this failing not by coming up with concrete predictions or falsifiable tests, but by redefining what is meant by theory confirmation. Many physicists and philosophers have jumped into this debate, and a recently completed workshop has produced no agreements, but lots of interesting perspectives being live blogged by a physicist. Also weighing in is a philosopher in three separate parts.
When it comes to the "scientific method", you may be surprised that it's more useful and illuminating to query the philosopher than the scientist.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And it's a construction worker's profession to implement an architect's design, but I wouldn't ask a construction worker to design my skyscraper.
The scientific method is a philosophical construct more than a scientific one.
You are welcome on my lawn.
But science has moved ahead of academic philosophy. Popper et. al. were, at best, describing how the science of their time and before was practiced, and if they had not been there, science would still have been the most amazingly productive human activity in history. It's not as if scientists were sitting around waiting for philosophers to figure out how to proceed.
Gross proposed to distinguish among frameworks, theories, and models. Classical mechanics, quantum mechanics and string “theory” are not theories, but rather frameworks. Theories are something like Newton’s or Einstein’s theory of gravity, or the unfortunately named Standard “Model.” Theories can be tested, frameworks not so much. Models include the BCS model of superconductivity, or BSM (Beyond Standard Model) models.
Unfortunately classical mechanics and quantum mechanics can and have been tested. Frameworks in his definition seem to be multiple applications of the same fundamental, physical principles to different situations. These can easily be tested and, for two of the examples given, have been. Then we get gems like:
According to Gross, since physical phenomena scale as the log(energy), physicists can extrapolate theory to very high energy. Unfortunately, experiments scale only as energy^2, which means that they cannot easily be extrapolated to very high energy.
which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Just off the top of my head there are the corrections to the Higgs mass which scale as energy squared (which is theory) and I've no idea what it means to say that an experiment scales with energy-squared since, for many experiments, increasing the energy is irrelevant and for others, e.g. a linear accelerator, the energy increases linearly with size.
I think the implication is that the scientific method may not be the best approach to uncover the manner in which the scientific method behaves.
That is a great example of begging the question.
The scientific method is entirely unnecessary to decide whether to step off of a tall building. People knew not do do that before the scientific method was codified.
You don't have to codify the method of study to use it. People who discovered the effects of falling off tall buildings WERE using the scientific method whether or not they were aware of that fact at the time.
Do you think it's a dick-measuring contest?
Science is about the testable. Math (and logic) is about the provable. Philosophy is about the more fundamental questions.
You may say "I know X to be true". That raises 3 fundamental questions without easy answers:
* What does "I" mean - Theory of Identity
* What does "know" mean - Theory of Knowledge (epistemology)
* What does "true" mean - Meta-Logic
Science is certainly practical. Philosophy rarely is. But philosophy does highlight how little we really know, despite our ever-growing skill at the practical. And it's worth remembering that every field of science started as philosophy, and only with the tools and the mindset did it eventually become practical, become science.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The scientific method requires that a hypothesis make definite predictions that can, in principle, be tested and falsified. As long as there are definite predictions that can be falsified, it's a valid hypothesis. Whether we have the ability to test that hypothesis at the present time or near future isn't relevant to its validity as a hypothesis. There are plenty of hypotheses that couldn't be tested when they were developed but have later been tested and are very useful to us today. General relativity was tested in 1919 but the outcome was pure luck because of the limits of the instruments. It wasn't verified properly until decades later. Yet general relativity is very important to us today because we have to take into account relativistic effects for things like GPS to work properly. Just because we can't test something now doesn't mean it's not useful.
If string theory makes no definite predictions, then it's not a valid hypothesis. However, if there are no definite predictions, it also has no actual impact on how we observe the universe to behave, and therefore isn't worth our time. If, however, it does make definite predictions. then it may have impacts on us in the future that we can't anticipate right now. Einstein had no way of knowing about GPS when he proposed general relativity. Because we haven't tested string theory, it's not a theory at all. If it makes definite predictions that we haven't tested, it's a hypothesis. There's nothing wrong with that, because all theories begin as hypotheses.
However, calling something a theory implies it's been tested and the observations fit the predictions that the theory makes. If string theory doesn't make any definite predictions that, even in principle, could be tested and shown to be false, it can never be a theory because it can't even be a hypothesis. That would effectively relegate string theory to the realms of things like intelligent design and young Earth creationism.
I would also add "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" are the aether of the 21st century.
Dark matter is a highly scientific and technical term that means "We don't know"
Seriously.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I would also add "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" are the aether of the 21st century.
This is actually quite true, not sure why someone modded you "flaimbait". Must be someone that doesn't understand that subject matter.
Dark Matter has never been directly observed, neither has Dark Energy. They are just suppositions that according to our current understanding, something must be there. This is in the same league as Aether - it was thought at the time that you needed a medium to transmit any sort of information, like sound waves.
I believe you are confused about what it means to "observe" something.
The observational support for Dark Matter is staggering. There is simply not enough matter of any of the types that we have in the Standard Model to explain the directly observable effect of gravity in the Universe. Dark Matter out-masses all of the types of matter we understand by 5-to-1 in the Universe; and right here at home, in our local galaxy, the Milky Way, it out-masses all conventional forms of matter 20-to-1. We can easily detect its gravitational influence, and produce maps of its distribution. Only if you believe that nothing can be "directly observed" from its gravity (as if it were "less real" than light, say) could your claim be defended.
The discovery of cosmic acceleration similarly is direct observational evidence of the existence of Dark Energy.
These two physical realities are so different from the hypothesized "ether" of pre-modern physics that it is clear you do not understand any of this.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
But science has moved ahead of academic philosophy.
Actually, more accurately, science -- since about 1950 -- tends to ignore a lot of the interesting insights that philosophy of science tends to offer. Hence your citation of a guy who died decades ago, rather than a lot of the stuff that has happened since.
Popper et. al. were, at best, describing how the science of their time and before was practiced, and if they had not been there, science would still have been the most amazingly productive human activity in history.
A few things here:
If Popper's ideas weren't very interesting or innovative, why does his idea of falsificationism get cited on Slashdot as the foundation of science all the time? How precisely do you think scientists formulated this idea before Popper? Answer -- they didn't. If you look at how science was practiced in the late 1800s, you'll see a lot more haphazard theorizing, the nature of mathematical models and statistics in relation to causality and significance was less formalized, and while people spoke in terms of "hypotheses" and "theories," it wasn't discussed in the way people on Slashdot talk about it today.
Popper's falsificationism developed out of a philosophical movement called logical positivism, which had tremendous influence on lots of people in the first half of the 20th century who were looking into the nature of the foundations of mathematics and science, the nature of "proof," etc. Stuff like Godel's incompleteness theorem came out of this.
But the scientific outlook was fundamentally changed as the nature of causality and explanation was invoked, rather than simple description.
With this heavier empirical burden, people like Popper criticized some of these concepts while offering new ideas about formulating hypotheses. If you think scientists just "intuited" the idea of falsifiability before Popper, you obviously haven't read a lot of science writing in the generations before him. Yes, some scientists were basically doing falsificationism, but Popper formalized the idea, and thus it caught on as a standard way of considering the validity of empirical methodology.
Of course, the naive view of falsificationism as usually presented by people on Slashdot isn't actually how science works, and Popper recognized this. He didn't believe that's how science advanced -- his theories were actually quite complex. And others followed in critiquing and coming up with new ways that more accurately reflects how science actually advances -- you get various perspectives from people like Kuhn, Lakatos, and even the wacky Feyerabend. And now we're only up to 1970 or so. Philosophers of science have had a lot more interesting things to say in the past 45 years too.
It's not as if scientists were sitting around waiting for philosophers to figure out how to proceed.
And you may say, "But it's philosophy! Who cares?!"
The thing is -- science doesn't actually work according to the oversimplified "scientific method" or according to pseudo-Popperian naive falsificationism. It's a lot more complicated, and it has a lot of methodological flaws. Philosophers of science identified many of these in the 1950s through 1970s, but scientists by then had stopped reading philosophy journals. Instead, this naive empiricism led to all sorts of abuses and missteps (see medical studies of the mid-20th century for lots of interesting examples).
But there's more. For the past few decades (beginning seriou
You are correct! No matter what it is that is causing the observed effects that is *dark matter.* There are many competing theories as to what dark matter is, some of them are outlandish. However, even if it turns out that the effects observed are caused by purple unicorn farts, the purple unicorn farts are dark matter.
I had an excellent conversation with a Slashdotter about this, just a few days ago, and I've concluded that I hate the name as much as I hate The God Particle. I can think of no other reason why people are so unwilling to understand. It's really quite simple. It is simple enough for *me* to understand it. Something is causing an effect. No matter what that is, whatever it turns out to be that is causing that effect, it is dark matter.
I know, I was even given some sort-of-thanks, that I explained this quite clearly in the thread that was active just this week. I even explained it multiple times and had some great replies and a good time was had by all. In that thread, I postulated that I'd need to repeat the same damned thing in this thread. Nobody ever listens to a KGIII. *sighs*
But, well, at least you get it, I don't know why the rest don't. However, I make this post to point out that I'd not thought about the term "place holder." I'm stealing that. I'm going to tweak it a little. We call it Dark Matter, as a place holder, because that lorem ipsum whateverum is just too damned long to type and memorize. Seriously, how is this a contentious matter? Now, the various theories as to what is causing the effect are straight up stupid (some of them) but that's immaterial.
I don't think that they thought it through very well when they decided to use this as a name. I can understand why some people are confused. I can't understand why they stay that way.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
There are methods like experiments and also methods like trying to logically compare an idea to things already known. In the end, any idea you throw Science at gets evaluated, and that's the point where some people might think that it has something to do with a belief, the belief that any idea should be evaluated by Science in general, and that the evaluation results are valid and in some way important to us.
"I believe you are confused about what it means to "observe" something."
Or is it you?
No, it is you.
Dark Energy is an observed phenomenon for which we have no explanation. Aether was an explanation proposed for an observed phenomenon. In the first case, we observed that the universe is expanding and that the expansion is accelerating. We can even calculate ho much energy would be needed to cause such an acceleration. But because we don't know anything else about it, we call it "dark" energy. In the second case, we have observed that electromagnetic radiation behaves like waves (interference etc.). How is it possible that radiation has wave-like properties without an apparent medium was unknown - aether was a theoretical construct proposed as an explanation. Turned out to be incosistent with the data pretty much from the get-go.
How you can compare those two is beyond me...